


Shadows of the Dark Lord

by sarap1993



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Mystery, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-23 23:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7484721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarap1993/pseuds/sarap1993
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty-two years after defeating Voldemort, Harry's nightmares are back. After all this time, could the Dark Lord be returning? Harry's disturbing visions lead him on a bizarre journey. The secret he unearths will change the wizarding world forever...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadows of the Dark Lord

At first it was an old dream. A high, cold laugh, a woman's scream, a blinding flash of green light - and Harry woke with a start, his scar paining him for the first time in twenty-two years. He ignored it. It didn't mean anything, he told himself firmly.

The next night Harry dreamt of a glinting blood-red stone and a man with two faces. Stress, he told himself. The night after that brought visions of a fifty-year-old diary, a handsome black-haired teen, a pair of piercing yellow eyes: just dreams, he reassured himself. Last week he had dreamt he was being eaten by a hundred-foot-tall Chocolate Frog, for heaven's sake.

The next night, Harry found himself tied to a marble headstone in the village of Little Hangleton's graveyard. He could only watch on, helpless, as Cedric Diggory - the details of whose face he had long since forgotten - was murdered and Lord Voldemort was reborn. Pale, spidery hands reached out for him: he jerked awake, heart hammering, scar throbbing. Beside him in the bed they shared, Ginny slept on oblivious.

Harry, desperate, went to Hogwarts to speak with Dumbledore’s portrait. “I must confess myself baffled,” the old man said when confronted with Harry’s predicament. “All I can offer is that these dreams are mere … echoes. Faint aftershocks.”

“They don’t feel faint to me,” Harry said.

“Of course not. I know this must be traumatic for you, Harry, forced to relive such horrors after all this time. But, I assure you, these dreams are nothing to worry about. Curses such as the one Lord Voldemort inflicted upon you never truly heal, after all. The truth of that lies there upon your forehead. Is your scar paining you?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “It’s strange, though. It feels a bit like – like those people who lose an arm or a leg but still feel pain in it from time to time. A bit like-”

“A bit like echoes?” Dumbledore gave Harry a reassuring smile. His blue eyes twinkled. “You’ll be alright, Harry. See our Professor of Herbology while you’re here. Ask him to brew you up a potion of dreamless sleep for tonight.”

Potion or no, Harry’s nightmares continued. Over the next week more faces followed: Sirius, falling through the archway in the Department of Mysteries; Dumbledore, blasted off the roof of the Astronomy Tower; Alastor Moody, Peter Pettigrew, Fred Weasley, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevey... Harry was soon afraid to sleep. He went to bed a fortnight after the nightmares began dreading what might await next.

He was surprised, then, to find when morning came that he had enjoyed eight hours of peaceful and uninterrupted slumber. When more such nights followed, Harry scolded himself for his earlier panicking. Voldemort was dead, he reminded himself. The wizarding world had been at peace for twenty years. Despite the persistent prickling of his lightning scar, all was well.

It was two weeks later that he first dreamt of the tower: jagged, black, standing two hundred feet tall on a storm-battered island. Harry was sure he had never seen it before - indeed it scarcely seemed real - but now every night he found himself standing beneath the tower's dark mass in the driving rain, hurrying inside, climbing. Soon, every time he blinked the tower flashed before his eyes. He grew obsessed.

It had taken him months to find it.

Sea-spray stung Harry's face as he stared, disbelieving, at the edifice that rose from the island rock before him like some twisted, monstrous flower. For a blessed moment he forgot the tormenting of his scar. The tower seemed at once both organic and deeply unnatural: ebbing here, flowing there, here showing a smooth reflective face, there offering a razor-sharp edge.

Harry cast his broomstick aside and started forward. This was an island in cartographical courtesy only - a flat slab of volcanic rock smaller than a Quidditch pitch two miles out to sea - and the tower stood alone at its exact centre. As he approached it loomed over him and he felt a familiar, unpleasant sensation: it was as if he were wearing Voldemort's Horcruxed locket around his neck again. He shook his head, but the action failed to dispel either the tower's sapping haze or the ever-intensifying pain in his temple.

Harry gritted his teeth and pushed on. When he neared the tower, a section of its exterior melted away to reveal a darkened entrance. Harry lit his wand and peered inside. Narrow stairs twisted claustrophobically upwards and out of sight.

He climbed in silence. The tower's power was stronger now: easing his nerves, soothing the pain in his forehead, beckoning him ever forwards and upwards. Harry found himself wondering what supernatural force could have so doggedly drawn him here. This monstrosity was surely Voldemort's work, but Voldemort was dead. Harry had seen him die. Harry had killed him. So what, if anything, could possibly await him at the end of this stairway? Whatever it might be, Harry felt with all the assurance of a practicing Auror that it posed no danger to him.

He was soon proved mistaken, however. The stairway seemed endless. As Harry rounded yet another tight bend, the pain in his scar rose to a sudden, frenzied peak. A foul-smelling gust of air swept down the stairs towards him; when it passed, it snuffed out his wandlight, plunging him into total darkness. Harry took a long moment to steady himself against a wall. Utterly blind, his sensory deprivation was broken only by the sound of heavy, frantic breathing; he was in the process of ordering himself to calm down when he realised that he had been holding his breath ever since his wandlight had been extinguished.

He wasn't alone in the stairway. He heard it more clearly now; whoever or whatever was making such a din behind him - panting, growling, stumbling around, clattering into walls - was close, and moving closer. " _Lumos!_ " Harry whispered. There was no response from the phoenix-feather wand that had always served him so faithfully. Sightless and helpless, he had no other choice but to stretch his arms out in front of himself and begin feeling his way forward inch by inch.

Harry soon lost all sense of time in the darkness. All he could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other. With each step came another scream of protest from his scar and something new for him to stumble over - loose rocks, uneven stairs, other, more frightening things. With each step, the noises behind drew closer and grew louder. With each step, the darkness ahead remained utterly impenetrable.

Then Harry's hand closed upon something soft and warm. As he yelled and leapt back, emerald-green lanterns all around burst into life. Harry span in a frantic circle, wand in hand. He had stumbled from the stairway onto the floor of a grand circular amphitheatre, he saw. There was no sign of his pursuer. The amphitheatre's walls were composed of the same flowing black stone as the tower; they reached up and up past rings of broken benches to a distant stalactite-strewn ceiling. Chained to a post in the centre of the amphitheatre floor was a boy. It was he whom Harry had blundered into in the darkness.

Somehow, Harry recognised him. Though his scar was paining him as it hadn't in twenty years, he stepped helplessly closer. The boy was secured to a wooden post at his wrists and ankles by heavy iron chains. Tattered grey rags preserved his modesty. Beneath a mop of black hair his eyes were closed in deep sleep; though he could not have been more than thirteen years old the handsome looks that would fool and ensnare so many were already well evident. Harry had seen this boy before - in a memory. Old instincts had the fingers of his right hand tightening around his wand; with his left he reached out, incredulous, sure this was some trick or apparition.

At Harry's touch the black-haired boy's eyes - wild, panicked, monstrous, scarlet - snapped open. Harry's scar exploded with pain. He swayed, fell. His vision swam and then went black.

 

The boy didn't know how long the man would be unconscious for - seconds, minutes, hours. All he knew was that he had to get out of here, and fast.

He took a frantic look around. He was in a strange, circular room lit only by flickering green torches. The air was gloomy and stank of decay. The floor was rough dark stone; it was bare except for a few crumbling limestone statues and heaps and heaps of dust. Past the man, sprawled prone, was a grand arched entryway. Beyond, stairs carved into the wall descended downwards.

A way out, perhaps. The boy was going nowhere presently, however; he was shackled hand and foot to a six-foot-tall wooden pole in the centre of the floor. He wrenched speculatively at his chains, then winced in pain as a sharp metal edge drew blood from the skin of his wrist. He balled his other hand into a fist and tried to work it free, but it was an impossible task.

It was precisely as he was lamenting the hopelessness of his situation that his chains uncoiled and clattered to the floor. He was caught by surprise - somehow, they had seemed to do it of their own volition. His legs, unexpectedly called upon to support his full weight, felt as if they were made out of jelly; as he stepped shakily forwards the boy wondered how long he had been tied up.

Between him and the stairway was the black-haired man's slumped form. The boy moved tentatively closer. The man looked middle-aged; his breathing was steady, but blood was oozing from a nasty gash in his forehead. His spectacles had slipped off during the fall. His right arm was outstretched to his side; he held a slender wooden stick loosely between his fingers. The boy didn't know what the stick was, but for some reason he felt very strongly that he should take it.

When he tugged it out of the man's grasp, he felt a strange tingly jolt shoot up his arm. He looked back to the black-haired man's face, more baffled than ever. Who was he? Why had he come here? Why had he passed out at the mere sight of the boy? Was it he who had imprisoned the boy in this strange, dark place? Could he explain why the boy couldn't recall a single thing about himself beyond his name?

For the first time, the boy noticed the curious scar on the man's forehead. It looked almost like a bolt of lightning. An odd sensation rose in the boy's insides then - a deep, burning hatred that he felt sure wasn't his own.

Behind him a voice whispered; the boy whirled, but there was no one there. At his feet the black-haired man groaned, eyes fluttering. He seemed, sluggishly, to be coming round. It was past time to get out of here, the boy decided - wherever here was. He turned and fled.

At the bottom of the stairway, the boy hesitated. Outside the mysterious tower's clammy confines, the weather was utterly vicious. Howling gales buffeted and battered from every side; icy rain pelted down in biblical quantities. The sound of pounding footsteps far above, though, made up the boy's mind for him - the black-haired man had entered pursuit. He dashed into the storm. Within seconds he was lost in the maelstrom. He span around wildly, but beyond barren grey rock he could see only churning water. His heart plummeted - he was on an island, he realised, and there was nowhere left to run. He fell to his knees. In front of him rose the dark, bizarre spire he had so recently emerged from - it resembled nothing so much as a giant half-melted candlestick. The boy began to cry. Where was he? Why was this happening to him?

 

Harry barrelled through the tower’s gaping slash of an entranceway into the rain. He looked about urgently for several seconds before spying the boy. He was sitting on a rock at the outcrop’s far edge, his back to Harry, staring out into the roiling waters. Harry hesitated, his worst fear – that the boy might already have disappeared – easing.

The boy glanced over his shoulder and saw Harry. He scrambled to his feet and made to run - quite where, Harry wasn’t sure. Before the boy could so much as take a step, Harry reached out a hand.

“ _Accio!_ ” he called.

Harry’s wand leapt from the boy’s hand. He caught it, relieved, then strode forward. Finding Harry closing off his landward escape routes, the boy turned instead towards the ocean. As Harry quickened his pace to close the distance between them, the boy bent his knees and made to dive off the edge of the outcrop. Harry slashed his wand through the air. His jinx stuck the boy's feet in place where he stood. Unexpectedly unbalanced, the black-haired boy fell in stages.

Harry stood over the boy in the rain, scar hammering. The boy looked up, made a panicked whimpering noise. He tried to scrabble away but found his feet still fixed in place by Harry's spell. Sprawled on his back, he gazed defiantly up at Harry. His eyes were wide, unblinking and slitted like a snake's.

The likeness was unmistakable. The haughty, handsome face of Tom Riddle; the paradoxical crimson eyes of Lord Voldemort. What on earth had Harry uncovered? More importantly, what on earth was he going to do?

The boy tried to yank his feet free, tugging to no avail until he cried out in pain and fear. The childish sound cut piercingly through the swirling fog of Harry’s thought. He half-lowered his wand, undid the jinx. The boy scrabbled back away from Harry towards the outcrop’s edge. “Please don’t kill me,” he begged.

Even the voice was the same. Tom Riddle’s voice; a thirteen-year-old boy’s voice. Harry stared down at the boy, and wide red eyes stared back. The moment seemed to stretch out; now it was Harry who felt frozen in place. In his mind’s eye he saw a flash of green light, heard the almost-forgotten sound of his mother’s dying scream. Confronted by the sight of what seemed to be the reincarnation of one of the most evil wizards in history, Harry found his throat suddenly very dry. Finally he found his voice. “What … are you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?" The boy seemed confused. "Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want with me?”

Harry, it was fair to say, was struggling to muster apposite action. Every time he looked at the boy the pain in his scar intensified. He gritted his teeth, fought the screaming lizard-brain instinct to turn away. “You stole my wand,” he said. For some reason, the accusation was the first thing that had come to Harry's mind.

Gazing up at Harry, the boy blinked. “What?”

With each flutter of the boy’s eyelids his slitted pupils dilated and contracted; Harry half-expected the boy to extend a forked tongue and snare a passing fly. “My wand,” he said. He indicated the phoenix-feather stick. “Why did you take it?”

The boy seemed to search around desperately – to the ground, to the air, to the heavens – for an answer: in vain. “I don’t know!” he exclaimed. “I just – look, I’m sorry!”

Harry wondered idly if that haughty voice had ever spoken those two words, _I’m sorry_ , before; he very much doubted it. “How did you get out of your chains?” he asked.

“They just fell off,” the boy said.

“How could they just fall off?”

“I don’t know!” The boy’s voice, panicked, was rising in pitch and volume. “Did you tie me up in there?”

“No,” Harry said, “I didn’t. Why did you run away?”

“I was scared!”

From the boy’s face, it was plain that he still was. Harry lowered his wand another few inches. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just … very confused.” He nodded over his shoulder towards the tower. “What were you doing in there?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. Seeming to calm slightly, he levered himself up into a seated position against a rock. “I – I don’t remember anything. Nothing before you waking me up.” He reached up to pull his rain-sodden hair out of his eyes, then looked suspiciously at Harry. “Do you know who I am? What were you doing here?”

“I don’t know who you are,” Harry said. The back of his right hand itched as he spoke. He had taught his children never to tell lies, and he tried to lead by example. In all honesty he wasn’t truly sure whether what he had told the boy was a lie or not. “I’m Harry. What’s your name?”

“Tom,” the boy said.

Harry’s scar twinged. But, apart from a slight tightening of his fingers around his wand, he controlled himself. Behind the boy, the sound of sea waves crashing into the rocks was oddly rhythmic. “You’re sure you don’t remember anything, Tom? What about your parents?”

“I told you,” the boy called Tom said heatedly, “nothing-”

The boy fell into a sudden bout of violent coughing and slumped against the rock. Harry stepped closer, stooped. The boy seemed faint; his breathing was shallow and fitful. He was pale as a corpse, and his lips were bloodless. “I think,” the boy murmured, “I maybe remember dreaming...”

“We should get out of here,” Harry said as the boy broke into another round of coughing. "Can you stand?”

“Can you help me?”

Harry made to do so - then hesitated. His scar was pounding. Some fundamental part of him warned against trusting this child – rather, this _thing_ – an inch. The nagging fear-voice reminded Harry that this boy’s soft voice, his handsome face, was nothing but a malevolent illusion. The fear-voice urged terrible things, things Harry could never and would never do. A battle raged in Harry’s insides between the fear-voice and the still-present soothing, seducing influence of the tower. The pain in Harry’s scar seared to a dagger-point. He knew he had to make a choice.

He made it. Glancing over his shoulder, Harry saw that the tower was gone. In its place was only flat grey rock. The tower – or whatever unnatural force controlled it – had gotten what it wanted. For better or worse, Harry felt sure he wouldn’t be troubled by dreams of it again.

Harry stooped to lift the boy to his feet. “Come on,” he said. “Have you Apparated before?”

“Have I what?” was the predictable response.

“Grab my arm and hold tight,” Harry told the boy, who did so. “This may be a little unpleasant.”


End file.
